Yemeni army officer, French national shot dead in Sana'a attacks
By Pol O Gradaigh and Nehal El-Sherif, dpa
05.05.2014
Cairo (dpa) - A Yemeni army officer and a French national were shot dead Monday in separate attacks in the Yemeni capital Sana'a, local media reported.
Gunmen in a car opened fire on the vehicle in which the Frenchman was travelling. Two more foreigners were wounded in the shooting, a security official told Barakish news website.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton condemned the killing of a member of the team providing security to the EU delegation in Yemen.
"The EU's presence in Yemen aims only to assist the country in its transition to democracy and in its economic development. To target persons engaged in this effort is evil and senseless," she said.
"The EU calls on the government of Yemen to take all necessary measures to restore security in the country, without which no progress on other challenges facing Yemen will be possible."
The UN Security Council condemned the attack: "Terrorism in all its forms and manifestations is criminal and unjustifiable."
In a separate attack, gunmen shot Mohammed Qauzia, identified as a security officer in a military language school, near his workplace, local news website al-Masdar Online reported.
A bomb exploded near an army bus with no reports of casualties.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, which come as the army presses its offensive against remote hideouts used by members of Yemen's al-Qaeda affiliate in the southern provinces of Shabwa and Abyan.
The official Saba news agency reported Sunday that troops had killed 37 al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) fighters, mostly foreign nationals, in clashes in Shabwa.
Yemeni security forces last week launched a major offensive in the rugged interior of the southern provinces.
The AQAP leadership and many of its fighters are thought to have been holed up in the region since mid-2012, when the military and allied tribal fighters forced them out of a string of southern towns they had occupied for about a year.
AQAP has been targeted in recent months by renewed US drone raids, carried out with the consent of the Yemeni government.
